Cameraless Photography and Its Imponderable Media

Abstract

This article explores turn-of-the-twentieth-century occult photographic experiments by Louis Darget and Hippolyte Baraduc that eliminated the technological medium of the photographic equipment and worked with an altogether different kind of medium: namely, the so-called ‘vital fluid’. These experiments fit into their era’s aim for scientific objectivity; however, by striving to exclude the camera from the image-making process, they highlight the complex media-theoretical dynamics at work in Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison’s ‘mechanical objectivity’. It is these media-theoretical implications that form the subject matter of this article. I explore the tension between Darget’s and Baraduc’s photographic practice, which stresses immediacy even as it continually enacts ‘medial tautologies’. Their attempts to capture the subtle media of effluvia reveal the presence of other media within the images: that of the technical apparatus (the emulsifying liquid) and that of the surrounding environment (the fluid of air). Thereby, their practice continually blurs the line between its object of representation and its medium of representation. This peculiar medial situation makes their experiments into sites for the analysis of the entwinement between objects of knowledge and their means of knowing as well as for the study of the attempt to grasp with the exact methods of science that which is beyond the purported limits of science.